Interesting bit on those auto switches, but I still think my previous post was pretty much correct. Looks like steel production is the 4th largest Mercury contributor, so those Mercury switches themselves have got to be way lower than #4.
Artisinal gold mining is still s major contributor
https://www.epa.gov/international-c...llution-artisanal-and-small-scale-gold-mining
I don't find your comment about enviroblend cement applicable as that appears to be a negligable percentage of the cement production
When you burn coal or coke there is a tiny (parts per million) amount in it. Coal is basically an ancient swamp that got buried and compressed over millions of years. Fresh water gets you coal, sea water gets you oil. There is a theory about a certain microbe later developed which consumes dead plants and drastically reduced coal and oil production compared to today but it still goes on. Either way swamps are chock full of essentially huge quantities of muck aka filter media and decayed plants aka activated carbon. They are huge environmental sink holes that form nature’s own sewage treatment plants. Sewage plants by the way are basically just manmade swamps and use the same processes. So it should be no surprise that coal is loaded with so many heavy metals that without flue gas treatment, they put out more radiation per kilowatt than nuclear plants.
Either way I have a degree in metallurgy and mineral processing so I know a lot about this stuff. The oldest and actually the first cast iron pipe plant in the US was located in Florence, NJ. I was the last engineer there until it closed 10 years ago, mostly due to the pre-Christie/Obama business climate. NJ had just passed their own mercury regulation set at 10 times tighter than EPA at a level so low that no soil in the US can pass. In other words if you make a garden in your back yard, it’s an environmental waste site. Mercury is one of the things Congress set the limit at “no measurable amount”. At one time this would be around 0.1% but as measurement technology has improved we are now at parts per billion. The law needs to change. There is no measurable health hazard when we are lower than the general environment.
Anyways back to the story. The foundry used cupola technology. The fuel is coke. About 25-35% of the output was from mercury tilt switches. It was a wet scrubber system for the most part. We used limestone (which converted to lime in the coke fire) which helps but not enough. Schloss the last remaining coke plant in the US closed so now Coke is mostly imported from China last I knew. Their coke is horrible especially in terms of emissions. At the time before they just gave up on doing business in New Jersey the plan was to mix enviroblend with the flue gas to remove mercury. Same technology is already used in trash to steam plants. The business moved along with the baghouse tp
Virginia.
Now enviroblend is kind of a secret recipe but I’ll give you a hint. When you make concrete a huge amount of the limestone never mind coal, silica, and feldspar is burned away. About 25% of what comes out of a cement kiln is dust with about half lime and Portland cement. Getting rid of kiln dust is a major problem for cement and lime kilns. Enter Enviroblend which is pretty much packaged lime and cement kiln dust. Now the test for heavy metals is to leach a sample with acid, filter and collect the liquid, and analyze it for metals usually in an ICP because it’s fast. The caustics from the lime and cement dust shoot the pH to 11. So are we actually capturing heavy metals or just buffering and neutralizing the acid in the test? Not being cynical here just pointing out the obvious.
Second hint I was the kiln engineer for the second biggest lime plant in the US too.
Lime and cement kilns burn coal outright instead of coke. There is tons of very reactive caustics everywhere and multiple heat and dust recycling loops never mind massive bag houses and multiple cyclones to contain and handle dust. Mercury boils at over 600 degrees while kiln off gassed in a straight lime kiln are at 600 while most modern designs run 250-400
at MOST. Almost everything gets captured.
It’s a similar story for iron and steel. In fact you need about 350-400 lbs. of lime to make a ton of steel and that’s just for the slag. Even more is needed in the baghouses for desulfurization on top of all the coke that is essentially just huge chunks of activated charcoal. Again heat recuperation and dust recovery are the rule not the exception.
So why do steel mills and cement kilns get to the top of the EPAs list when in realiry as I sort of explained iron foundries should be the worst by far? It is the moronic way EPA calculates emissions. First off they do not look at emissions AFTER environmental controls. The assumption is that if it wasn’t for them we’d just run open stacks. It’s hilarious because if you get just one snoot full of the carbon monoxide laden gas off the top of a cupola for instance (50% CO/50% CO2, 0% O2) you will die.
But then EPA gets just plain stupid. They leave out the concentrations in their calculations. Say I have a pile of 1000 TONS of dirt. We will make that metric tons because the math is easier. Say I accidentally break one small drug store thermometer accidentally and it soaks into my dirt pile. Say the mercury weighs 1 gram. When I do the EPA paperwork I have to report it as 1000 TONS of mercury contaminated dirt as my spill. The amount is one part per million so it is measurable and thus reportable. EPA then goes on to drop the concentration part and I’m credited with 1000 tons of mercury waste.
They do this with water, solids, and air. So it’s pretty easy to claim that XYZ industry has huge amounts of emissions that “must” be regulated because they conveniently drop the part about concentration.
So sorry. My experience with gold is all modern plants like Newmont. I know about mercury amalgamation because we learned about it in college as the history of gold mining but that was a century ago. Hardly any of that gold makes it into industrial use. Again sounds like typical and utterly false EPA math there. The largest gold producer in the world is Newmont. You can find and read their environmental emissions records very easily. If you don’t want to dig just email the stock holder relations office and ask, Their mercury emissions is nowhere close to what EPA claims, I already explained how they fraudulently inflate the numbers. Who do we believe, a company that can be sued out of existence or have their corporate officers jailed for putting out false information, or a federal agency that clearly and blatantly produces fraudulently inflated data for political purposes?
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